"Adobe first launched Creative Suite 1 back in 2003, and now, ten years and six versions later, the company is taking a left turn: Adobe is abandoning its Creative Suite entirely to focus efforts on Creative Cloud."

I had missed this tidbit, but apparently Adobe already took done activation servers for CS1 and CS2. Now they put up links for downloadable copies that have serials that don't require activation BUT you are not supposed to use them unless you already owned the product.

For some kid or mom who really only needs ACDSee or Elements at best, that is fine. But if I was a semi-pro users that is disturbing.

Will Adobe eventually remove activation service for all past versions of the Creative Suite except for the current Creative Cloud one?

At that point, yes, GIMP is starting to look better and better. I personally have used it for some time and it is on par with at least Photoshop 7 which I also still use because of the plugin support. Between those two on XP Mode on a Windows 7 x64 Pro workstation with 16GB of RAM, I am fine for any semi-pro graphics manipulation I might need. For me, it is my photography. For my wife, it is digital art and graphics design for other small businesses in our market segment.